Two years and millions spent targeting raw milk distributors in LA county

[onawah]

Court documents reveal LA County prosecutor Kelly Sakir used infiltration agents, hidden cameras, extreme surveillance to target Rawesome Foods

(Note from OP: I hope this goes viral, as people need to see what insanity is being committed in the name of health and justice. )

http://www.naturalnews.com/033822_Kelly_Sakir_Rawesome_Foods.html

(NaturalNews) Examples of government-sponsored terrorism against innocent Americans continue to pour in to NaturalNews, and no case better demonstrates it than the Rawesome Foods raid and the ongoing persecution of its organizers. In court proceedings last Thursday, LA County prosecutor Kelly Sakir turned over 1,097 pages of "discovery" documents to the defendants' attorneys, revealing an utterly astonishing campaign of spying, surveillance, and entrapment that has targeted Rawesome Foods for at least the last two years.

NaturalNews has learned that at least three undercover operatives were hired by the LA County prosecutor's office to infiltrate Rawesome Foods and sign up as members while covertly filming their actions using hidden cameras in their purses. These cameras almost certainly captured video footage of other members at Rawesome Foods, meaning the government itself stands in violation of wiretapping laws that it often uses against innocent civilians who try to videotape traffic stops by local police.

NaturalNews has also learned that there are 42 discs of additional evidence which has been gathered by the LA County prosecutor -- including interviews with the operatives, covert camera footage, documents and even video footage from a surveillance pole camera that LA County set up across the street to spy on Rawesome Foods.

Mass murderers? No, just people distributing unpasteurized milk
The depth of this evidence reveals that LA County has spent millions of dollars conducting the most aggressive, vindictive and downright abusive surveillance campaign against a food distribution club that has ever been recorded in human history.

The level of resources that has been directed against Rawesome vastly exceeds the resources typically used against murderers, rapists or organized crime mob bosses. Under the excuse of protecting the public from "fresh milk," LA County has spent millions of dollars and countless thousands of hours conducting the kind of surveillance that would sensibly only be reserved for hard-core violent criminals such as serial killers.

"You have to wonder how many people died from murders in LA County while these prosecutors were busy running surveillance on the distribution of fresh milk," Robert Scott Bell said. He's the host of the Robert Scott Bell Show and will be covering this issue on Monday's broadcast (www.NaturalNewsRadio.com). "Couldn't these law enforcement resources have been put to a better use protecting society from real criminals?"

"It all harkens back to Thomas Payne, with Common Sense," added attorney Ajna Sharma, who represents James Stewart. "We have lost our common sense; we've lost the true meaning of what it means to be an American and what freedom means."

Kelly Sakir and the new "green" government tyrants
This government tyranny against Rawesome Foods has been spearheaded by LA County prosecutor Kelly Sakir, who NaturalNews can now reveal is a rabid environmentalist who gave donations to MoveOn.org and an environmental PAC (political action committee) in 2004. (http://www.newsmeat.com/fec/bystate...)

Sakir is part of a new breed of what some people are calling "government terrorists" who cannot discern right from wrong and merely use their positions of authority to carry out what are essentially terrorism campaigns against those they hate. In reality, the viciousness of this attempted prosecution of James Steward, Sharon Palmer and Victoria Bloch can only be rightly characterized as a "hate crime" being carried out by the government itself, all under a special "environmental crimes" unit that claims to be protecting the public.

In reality, however, these so-called "crimes" are all utterly fabricated -- just like the "war on terror" -- and those targeted for persecution by the state or federal government are usually just innocent Americans who are trying to run an honest business, or distribute honest food, or contribute to society in a meaningful way.

The government is literally trying to destroy America's economy and freedoms
Case in point: Gibson Guitars was raided by the federal government and accused of "environmental crimes" for importing wood from India to be used in its guitars. The federal government said that it is now illegal for U.S. workers to "work imported wood from India" and that if it wanted to avoid such raids in the future, Gibson should move its manufacturing jobs overseas! (http://www.naturalnews.com/033454_G...) and (http://www.naturalnews.com/033506_G...)

It's true: Both state governments and federal agencies are now actively working to destroy America's health and its economy by shutting down businesses and organizations that offer jobs or natural health solutions to the American people. The terror-style tactics being used against Rawesome Foods are indicative of the fact that this is not a customary criminal investigation but rather a government vendetta against health freedom.

This is the government, in other words, actively seeking to destroy your right to access real food and thereby protect your health in the process. This is government waging war on the American people under the label of "environmentalism."

More charges may yet be leveled against James, and more defendants may be named
NaturalNews has learned that Kelly Sakir intends to name more defendants in the case and even add more charges to the counts already faced by James Stewart. Throwing these people in jail for several days and dragging them into court isn't enough, it seems; Kelly Sakir seems to want to destroy their lives and make sure they do hard time in prison.

What's clear from this is that Kelly Sakir is out for blood and is on some sort of bizarre punitive rampage against James Stewart in particular and health freedom in general. And she's using taxpayer resources in LA County to bankroll her personal vendetta against fresh milk and anyone involved in distributing it. (Does she hate cows or something? Did she step in a pile of cow poo as a child and now she forever seeks revenge on cow milk?)

If you live in LA County, keep in mind that your tax dollars are supporting all this tyranny!

Take action: Here's how to protest this madness
I encourage you to join me in contacting the LA County District Attorney's office today and letting them know what you think about this total waste of taxpayer money to conduct extreme surveillance over fresh milk.

Their contact page is at:
http://da.co.la.ca.us/feedback.htm

There, you can call, email or post a form. The best option is to CALL them at (213) 974-3512 because phone calls mean much more than emails.

You might consider calling their Hate Crime Unit at (213) 202-7799 and leaving a message complaining about Kelly Sakir and her hate crimes against raw milk.

Or call the Consumer Protection Division at (213) 580-3273 and complain that consumer rights are under assault by prosecutor Kelly Sakir who has stripped away the consumer right to purchase fresh milk and cheese.

Contact the Bureau of Community Relations at (213) 974-7401 and tell them how incensed you are that LA County tax dollars are being used to hire undercover agents to investigate raw milk instead of being used to track down and arrest violent criminals.

Call their Major Crimes Division at (213) 974-3800 and explain that Kelly Sakir is running a major criminal operation against innocent LA County citizens who are merely distributing wholesome food to private members. Sakir sure looks a lot more like the criminal here than James Stewart!

And email them, if you want, at webmail@da.lacounty.gov (although remember, emails will probably just be deleted).

LA County District Attorneys = terrorists in training?
What we are witnessing here, friends, is an out of control government terrorist organization known as the LA County District Attorney's Office. Of course, most people in the LA County DA's office are good people. Most of them are hard at work trying to protect society from REAL criminals -- the murderers, rapists, con artists, fraudsters and so on. And yet within their midst, they have Kelly Sakir, an out-of-control, rampaging government tyrant who makes the whole department look like a bunch of low life government thugs (or criminal terrorists who actively plot against innocent people).

It's incredible that they keep this woman on the payroll and let her spend millions of dollars in taxpayer money going after RAW MILK!

Hey, LA County DA people: Aren't there REAL criminals that need to be surveilled? Aren't there violent gang members who deserve your attention rather than a bunch of raw cheese eaters? What is wrong with you people? With each passing day that you allow Kelly Sakir and her rampage of hatred continue, you discredit your entire office and prove all the rest of us right when we say you are a bunch of government terrorists who care nothing for the people and only enjoy abusing your power to get off on some sort of insane ego trip.

In my opinion, Kelly Sakir is the real criminal in all this, and if any money should be spent on surveillance at all, it should be spent keeping an eye on Sakir and her abuse of government power. This is a clear-cut case for a criminal investigation in Kelly Sakir's abuse of power and violation of the civil rights of James Stewart and others. The LA County DA's office should investigate Kelly Sakir, I say, and potentially bring charges for her outrageous waste of taxpayer dollars and for waging a completely unjustified personal war against Rawesome Foods which poses no threat whatsoever to the public at large.

Her abuse of power is so clear-cut that if you open an encyclopedia and turn to the entry for "government abuse of power," it should have Kelly Sakir's mug shot there.

This woman is an embarrassment to law enforcement, an embarrassment to the people of LA County, and an embarrassment to the very idea of justice in America. I think Sakir is a power-tripping paranoid sociopath who will apparently waste any amount of LA County taxpayer dollars in her quest to destroy her targeted enemies, even when they pose no threat to the public.

Send us any tips you have about Kelly Sakir
NaturalNews is now accepting reader tips through a more streamlined process. If you have any tips about Kelly Sakir that you think we need to know, submit them to us at:
http://www.naturalnews.com/newstips...

We will review all submitted tips in a timely manner. Thank you for helping us expose government corruption in LA County and help protect the lives of innocents.

[Tony]

This is from BARRY GROVES--website SECOND OPINION.
This site is full of helpful information.
The authorities know exactly what they are doing.


Milk: from healthy to harmful




Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Introduction

In the 1930s, Sir John Boyd-Orr recommended that we in Britain should drink more milk to improve our health. He was talking of full-cream milk, of course; skimmed milk was fed to pigs. Since then, milk and dairy products have been heavily promoted for their health-giving properties. But, although cow's milk is still enthusiastically promoted as providing adults with 'essential' vitamins and minerals, after the Committee on the Medical Aspects of Food Policy (COMA) introduced us to 'healthy eating' in 1984, the dogma about fat causing heart disease has transformed milk from healthy, fresh whole milk to a product which is utterly denuded of most of its essential nutrients — the most important of which is the fat in its cream.

How milk is processed

When I was young, milk was collected from a local farm, cooled and then delivered to households by horse and cart. At the door, the milk was measured out with a half-pint ladle. The cream floated naturally to the top of the churn; the delivery man had to stir it to make sure that everyone benefited. My mother had young children, so our milkman was careful to ensure that we got a bit more cream by ladling the creamier milk off the top. The milk was no older than the previous evening's milking. We were healthy in those days.

Today, raw milk is collected from farms daily for delivery to dairies by tanker for storage and processing. To make it 'safe for drinking' the raw milk is then heat-treated at a variety of temperatures to kill any bacteria and increase its shelf life. The lowest temperature is used in pasteurization; the highest is UHT (ultra-high temperature). Most milk in UK is pasteurized.

After pasteurization, milk to be sold as liquid milk is separated from its cream in a centrifuge. With the cream separated from it in this way, we are left with skimmed milk. The cream is then blended back into the skimmed milk in measured amounts to produce whole milk — 3.3% fat although whole milk would be over 4% naturally — and semi-skimmed milk (1.7% fat). Excess cream is sold as cream or used to make butter.

During the blending process the fat globules in the cream are usually broken up and dispersed throughout the liquid milk to give the finished product a more uniform texture. This process, called homogenization, also prevents the cream from rising to the top. Whole milk in supermarkets is homogenized.

After the entire process has been completed, the milk is heat treated yet again and then cooled before being packaged and sold to retailers.

Other than the addition of the cream back into the milk, every step in this process makes the finished product less and less healthy for consumers.

Skimmed milk and prostate cancer

Around 1975, scientists noted an apparent strong correlation between milk intake and deaths from prostate cancer. Since then, there have been growing suspicions of a causal link between the two which two studies published in 2007 appeared to confirm. The first was the CLUE II study which involved nearly 4,000 men in Washington County, Maryland.[1] This study found that men who consumed five or more servings a week of dairy foods were more likely to suffer from prostate cancer than those who ate a serving of one or less. The second study involved over 29,000 Finnish men taking part in the Alpha-tocopherol, Beta-Carotene Cancer Prevention Study (ATBC Study) which ran for 17 years.[2] This also found that the more dairy consumed, the higher the risk of cancer.

The first thing to be blamed for such an association, as it always seems to be, was the saturated fat in the cream.[3] But mounting evidence suggests that the truth is quite different because full-cream milk does not increase prostate cancer risk, only skimmed milk does. It was the stripping of fat from the milk — to make it 'healthier' — which actually increased the risk.

The 11-year Physicians' Health Study, involving over 20,000 men, found that all the increased risk of prostate cancer associated with dairy intake was attributable entirely to skimmed milk.[4]

In 2005, the first National Health and Nutrition Examination Epidemiologic Follow-up Study (NHEFS), involving more than 3,600 men and 10 years of follow-up, arrived at a similar conclusion. They found that men with the highest intakes of dairy were more than twice as likely to develop prostate cancer as men with the lowest intakes. But the risk was higher only with low-fat milk — not with whole milk or any other dairy. In fact, whole milk actually seemed to protect against prostate cancer.[5] Similar results were found in other countries. A Norwegian study of more than 25,000 men,[6] and an analysis of milk drinking and diet in 41 countries,[7] found that prostate-cancer death rates were associated only with the drinking of low-fat or skimmed milk.

Low-fat milk increases women's cancers too

Women are presently encouraged to consume dairy products as a source of calcium to prevent osteoporosis. And, because of the fat scare and the fact that all the calcium is in the milk, not in the cream, the milk women are advised to drink is skimmed.

Studies have looked at dairy intake and rates of ovarian cancer and found an increased ovarian cancer risk with milk drinking. But just as in the case with prostate cancer in men, there is no increased risk with whole milk; only with low-fat milk and skimmed milk. The Iowa Women's Health Study investigated the association of epithelial ovarian cancer with dietary ingredients in a study of 29,083 postmenopausal women.[8] They found that skimmed milk, but not whole milk, was significantly associated with an increased incidence of ovarian cancer.

An even larger study published six years later confirmed the Iowa results. In the Brigham and Women's Hospital Nurses' Health Study, in which more than 80,000 women participated, those who consumed just one or more servings of skimmed or low-fat milk products per day had a 32% higher risk of any type of ovarian cancer, and a 69% higher risk of the most widespread form — serous ovarian cancer — compared with women who had three or fewer servings monthly. Yet again, whole milk did not increase the risk.[9]

References

1. Rohrmann S, et al. Meat and dairy consumption and subsequent risk of prostate cancer in a US cohort study. Cancer Causes Control 2007; 18: 41-50.
2. Mitrou PN, et al. A prospective study of dietary calcium, dairy products and prostate cancer risk (Finland). Int J Cancer 2007; 120: 2466-2473.
3. Willett WC. Nutrition and cancer. Salud Publica Mex 1997; 39: 298-309.
4. Chan JM, et al. Dairy products, calcium, and prostate cancer risk in the Physi-cians' Health Study. Am J Clin Nutr 2001; 74: 549-554.
5. Tseng M, et al. Dairy, calcium, and vitamin D intakes and prostate cancer risk in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Epidemiologic Follow-up Study cohort. Am J Clin Nutr 2005; 81: 1147-1154.
6. Veierod MB, et al. Dietary fat intake and risk of prostate cancer: a prospective study of 25,708 Norwegian men. Int J Cancer 1997; 73: 634-638.
7. Grant WB. An ecologic study of dietary links to prostate cancer. Altern Med Rev 1999; 4: 162-169.
8. Kushi LH, et al. Prospective study of diet and ovarian cancer. Am J Epidemiol 1999; 149: 21-31.
9. Fairfield KM, et al. A prospective study of dietary lactose and ovarian cancer. Int J Cancer 2004; 110: 271-277.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

[onawah]

Pasteurized, homogenized milk is not a healthy food source. Raw dairy products, however, contain many benefits. There are lots of articles on Dr. Mercola's site and the Natural News site about the benefits.
Here are links for a couple:
http://blogs.mercola.com/sites/vitalvotes/archive/2007/06/04/Is-Raw-Milk-Right-For-You.aspx
http://www.naturalnews.com/023083.html

hoPiNASGeWo

And here is a site dedicated to raw milk advocacy:
http://www.rawmilk.org/default.php

[Ascension]

This is all part of the scope of Agenda 21 which is intended to take farming away from individuals/small businesses to eventually gain complete corporate control over all food production, and they're doing it by playing a false, food safety card.

[TigaHawk]

Something ive noticed they do over here, perhaps someone should pass this on?


"Cleopatras Bath Milk"

http://www.mrorganic.net.au/images/productimages/Cleopatra%20Bath%20Milk%202L.jpg

http://www.angelfire.com/folk/rawmilk/

Raw milk - for drinking - But advertised as "Bath milk" for "Revitalising the skin"

Since its not marketed for injestion, it can bypass their selling of raw milk for consumption, as it clearly states on the bottle its for external use only.

People whom are seeking this raw milk in the first place, know they can drink and do what they please with it tho.


Would this approach not save them greif from the FDA Monsters?

[onawah]

It used to be that raw milk could be sold in stores as "pet food" when I lived in California. I don't know if that is still happening, since I left that state.
The authorities knew it was drunk by people, though, I'm sure, but were willing to turn a blind eye.
I'm not so sure that is still the case, however, as there is an agenda that goes much deeper, having to do with population control.

[Mike]

ahhhh, a topic near and dear to my heart.

i love raw milk. i drink it when i can afford it, which isn't too often but better than never, i guess.

i have to say, i cannot understand the government's stance on this. in my opinion, they are only bringing more attention to the cause of the raw milk enthusiasts.

think about it: even if it was made legal tomorrow, there would still only be a small portion of the population drinking it. hardly enough to eat into pasteurized milk's profit. sure, people will be healthier and more aware and so on(of course, they don't want this) but a)it would only be a small group, relatively speaking, and b) there are LEGAL nutritional supplements, like coq10 for example that would cause big pharma/gov't (they are in bed together, no?) to lose much more $ than something like raw milk if the people were truly aware of its capability. so why all the attention - and guns - on raw milk???

i doubt it would ever be anything that caught on like wildfire. the masses imo would still shy away from it due to the anti-raw propaganda and disinfo. the gov'ts aggressive actions truly baffle me??? :confused:

[onawah]

I would say it's clear evidence that TPTW are acting out of fear, Chinaski, and it's one of the reasons why I have a lot of hope that their actions, which continue to be more and more self-defeating, signal a clear victory for the 99%.
Another reason, I would imagine, is that it's such a complete food, you can just about live on it alone.
Also, they are arrogant and still think they can win, so they don't bother to cover their tracks enough to fool anyone but a fool. 911 is clear evidence of that, and this raw milk foolishness is another.
It only makes those of us who are onto their tricks all the more determined.
I am so lucky. I can get raw milk for $3 a gallon from a local farmer. I buy 2- 3 gallons a month, use some for hot chocolate and the rest I make kefir with, which lasts for a long time and is even more nutritious than plain raw.
Raw goat milk is even better, but pricier and not as easy to get.

[leavesoftrees]

Article on raw milk in the Weekend Australian magazine 10-12-11


LET'S call him Curtis. Three days a week he gets into his small unmarked truck and drives to a farm somewhere in Western Australia. There, he fills a tank with about 250 litres of a substance that has been banned from human consumption because, authorities warn, the bacteria in it can cause illness and possibly death, especially in pregnant women, young children, the elderly and people with compromised immune systems. Curtis drives his truck back to Perth where, at a few designated drop-off points, mothers and children are waiting. Waiting for their man, with bottles to be filled from his refrigerated vat of bacterial soup. Right out in the open. Everyone can see them scoring their fix in those stark Perth suburbs of limestone walls and searing light.


He will not talk to them about the product. If they want to mention doing anything with this unpasteurised milk other than bathing in it, they're cut from the list. At $3 or $4 a litre (depending on what breed of cow it comes from), you'd have to be keen to throw it in the tub. But he can sense their desperation. He hears the kids squealing with delight and sees the smiles on the mums' faces and that's all he needs to know.
Curtis is a mechanical engineer by trade and only started doing the milk run a couple of years ago when a mate needed a hand driving the truck - trafficking, you might say. But then he saw those glad faces and he was hooked, too. Eighteen months later, he forgot to brief a new customer on the no-talk policy and suddenly she blurted out: "Our guts have been off forever. It's the first time we've been able to be normal." He hadn't heard a testimonial on his product before and it opened his eyes a little further, even though, with a scientific background, he knows the power of a placebo.


Now his kids are a bit embarrassed about him being a milko. They'd prefer he went back to his trade, but he thinks it's too important to give up. These people need him. The dairy that sells the raw milk needs him. His milk run saved the joint from insolvency. And while he's not exactly hiding, he's not going public, either. "People who really want it get hold of me," he says. "It's only word of mouth. I don't want to fight the war or be an advocate, I just want to give milk to the people who need it."


Milk was so nutritious 6000 years ago that those northern Europeans and east Africans lucky enough to get the genes to enable them to digest it had, according to the genetic evidence, 10 times more offspring than those who didn't have the genes. Now authorities state explicitly that there are no health benefits to drinking raw milk and that there are significant risks of bacterial infection. Doctors routinely tell people with chronic illnesses not to drink it. But the raw milk buffs aren't listening; they don't want to drink shop-bought milk, which has been separated and put back together for the desired fat/protein/calorie ratio, sieved to shrink the fat molecules so you don't have the inconvenience of needing to shake the bottle, and cooked to kill all the apparently deadly bacteria.


Those who want to drink milk the way it used to be wonder why it is illegal in a world where alcohol, cigarettes and white bread are available over the counter. So despite all the health warnings and assurances from authorities that raw milk has no more nutritional value than pasteurised milk, an underground network of milk lovers has quietly gone about procuring this contraband. And a handful of dairy farmers have started skirting the edges of the law to supply it to them.


Cathy Mifsud's teeth were eroding at the gum line. It wasn't like the then 32-year-old wasn't eating right, she thought. She'd been a vegan for the better part of 12 years and if she wasn't strictly vegan for all that time, she was certainly vegetarian. The dam broke for her about a year after reading a book called The Vegetarian Myth and she began eating meat every night for six months. "My body had been starving," she recalls from her home in Castlemaine, Victoria. When she fell pregnant a year after dropping vegetarianism, she started craving butter and could just about eat it straight.


Still, after her daughter was born in 2005, it was as if her body fell apart. She couldn't sleep yet could hardly lift her head off the pillow. Her teeth had continued eroding at the gums and were decaying as well. "I could see the changes in them from week to week. I didn't know where to start to look into it. The dentist was really worried. I googled 'heal teeth naturally' and that's how I found the Weston A. Price Foundation. It blew my world."


As Mifsud read about the American dentist's controversial advocacy of raw milk she knew she had to find some. A few months later, a friend rang up all excited. "I've got some raw bath milk in my hands from the health food shop." It was a then newly available product called Aphrodite Bath Milk from a dairy at Lakes Entrance in Victoria. She fermented the milk with kefir grains - colonies of yeast and bacteria - and just couldn't get enough. She drank 1.25 litres a day for the next two years. Her strength came back. The tooth decay stopped in its tracks.


Then Mifsud found a local farmer who was milking one cow. She'd rock up at his house with her bottles to find the whole dining area a mess of boxes and bottles as other mums from the school snuck in to get theirs. "The farmer worked so hard and wouldn't accept more than $2 a litre," she says. "There was a passion behind it. They wanted to supply really good food to people."


A decade ago, if you wanted raw milk you had to buy a cow (unless you lived in South Australia, where it was legal until 2003). But all that began to change when Gympie farmer Trevor Mahaffey was faced with the big squeeze of dairy deregulation in 2000. The third-generation dairy man knew his farm was too small to survive. So he started looking around for a niche. He decided on organics and he even built a small pasteurisation plant so he could sell milk direct to health food shops, but from the beginning those shops told him they wanted their milk raw. One of them suggested they could get around the ban on raw milk by selling it as Pet's Milk.


Mahaffey was no stranger to the product. Raw milk had been legal in Queensland up to 1988, and in the late '70s his family had a milk run in Gympie delivering both raw and processed milk. "The dairy farms that had a producer's licence were inspected two or three times a week and were of the highest cleanliness," he says. "No one ever got sick because it was produced in a very clean environment.


"When I first rang the Queensland Dairy Authority to tell them what I was doing with Pet's Milk, the chairman thought it was a great idea. He was an old dairy man and he knew the tough times that the industry was in for. But the demand turned out to be huge so it upset the big processors; they got onto him and he rang me and told me they were causing problems." Safe Food Queensland took over from the Dairy Authority and it didn't take long for the court cases to start. "For three or four years we were constantly in court."


The then law student Bruce Bell had grown up on Jersey milk from his family's house cow in suburban Perth. He missed it. One day his wife came home with a bottle of Pet's Milk. He saw a number on the bottle and got straight on the phone to Mahaffey to tell him how delighted he was; he'd been looking for raw milk for years. "I expect you will run into problems with the authorities," Bell said. "If you do, let me know. I can probably help you."


Six months later, the call came. "I'm three weeks from being put out of business," Mahaffey told him. In the months that Bell had been drinking the milk he credited it with clearing up his psoriasis. The fierce libertarian was up for a fight. He used the Legislative Standards Act - which says legislation cannot be needlessly intrusive into the lives of citizens - to go on the attack. He issued every minister in the Beattie cabinet with a Supreme Court summons as a co-respondent under section 4 of the judicial review legislation demanding that the cabinet justify in writing why banning fresh milk wasn't needlessly intrusive. The court threw it out, the legal bills mounted and Mahaffey had to sell half the farm. The parliament outflanked them, banning raw milk even for animal consumption. On the day the legislation passed, Mahaffey had new labels ready. From that day on, his product has been sold as Cleopatra's Bath Milk.


"We've had no problems from the government since then, and we're always ready to fight them if they do," says Mahaffey. If they ban its use as a cosmetic, he'll sell it as tennis court line marker, white-out, whatever.


"When we started, every dairy farmer was against us. There were 1600 dairy farmers in Queensland then. Now there are 550. In the last 12 months I've had a lot of farmers struggling that much they've rung to ask if they could do what we're doing, but the market isn't big enough. While you have the government making out that drinking raw milk is extremely dangerous, it's not going to be viable."


There has been one outbreak of illness allegedly caused by Mahaffey's milk. In 2001, eight people at Nambour on the Sunshine Coast suffered diarrhoea and vomiting brought on by cryptosporidium. Seven of them had drunk Pet's Milk. Mahaffey disputes that his milk was to blame and says there were other cases at the time that weren't studied because they hadn't drunk his milk. "And no one else who drank from that batch of 1000 litres had any problems.


"Pasteurisation was brought in for TB and brucellosis and they were eradicated in Australia 30 or 40 years ago. Now they say it's because of E.coli and listeria."


Since Mahaffey led the way, three other dairies have started supplying bath milk out in the open, and at least three more have begun selling shares in their cows (because you're not allowed to sell raw milk but you can drink it from your own cow). I was also told of three more dairies that were, like Curtis's, selling bath milk on the quiet. It can be a costly business for those caught flouting the laws - a number of Sydney traders have been prosecuted in recent years, with fines of up to $53,000 being imposed.


Modelling by Food Standards Australia New Zealand predicted that if raw milk were sold in retail outlets, every 100,000 serves of 540ml to a child would produce "97 cases of EHEC [an E.coli-related illness], 153 cases of salmonellosis and up to 170 cases of listeriosis". There are probably more than three million such serves of bath milk being sold each year. If people are drinking it and feeding it to their children, and they are, there should have been thousands of cases by now. I contacted the various health authorities in each state to find the dead, or at least the sick.


The last known case of illness from raw milk was in 2003 at a school. There were eight outbreaks between 1995 and 2003. Four of those involved school camps where raw milk was served presumably to children who weren't used to drinking it, two other outbreaks involved farm visits, and only one claimed outbreak involved retail bath milk - the disputed Pet's Milk outbreak of 2001. Out of all these outbreaks, four people were hospitalised. In 1976, 500 people in Whyalla, South Australia, had salmonella poisoning, 95 per cent of whom said they'd drunk raw milk. There were no deaths. By way of comparison, there are 11,500 cases of food poisoning every day in Australia, killing about 120 people a year.

One person who had been scared off raw milk by the health warnings was Nina Grundner, 28. When she was pregnant with her first child, she picked up a bottle of Aphrodite Bath Milk in her local organic shop and read the label: "For cosmetic purposes only." She knew about listeria, E.coli and salmonella and how dangerous they could be in pregnancy so she put the bottle back on the shelf. She'd never endanger her unborn child.


After the birth, she and her partner, Ben Falloon, moved back to his family farm at Woodend, north of Melbourne. They wanted to be as self-sufficient as possible so they got a dairy cow - a Jersey named Ivy. Before they started milking, however, she read up on raw milk's dangers. From the internet and a book called The Untold Story of Milk by Ron Schmid, she adopted the view that many of the vitamins in milk are destroyed by pasteurisation and that the good bacteria are killed along with the potentially bad ones.


"After my daughter was born my back and hips were really sore for many months, but when I started drinking whole raw milk all the pain disappeared," says Grundner. "My cavities from a life of living on what I thought was healthy food are filling in now."


So when Grundner fell pregnant again this year there was no question of boiling Ivy's milk. She wasn't afraid of the deadly bacteria scientists say inhabit it. "I believe raw milk is a big contributor to my own health and the health of my child ... Compared to other people I know who are pregnant, I have almost no typical pregnancy ailments."


Renowned dietitian Rosemary Stanton, however, mirrors mainstream scientific opinion when she says raw milk has no proven nutritional benefits and huge risks. And she knows from painful experience. "I drank raw milk and I suffered," says the 67-year-old. "I contracted brucellosis in my early teens. We had one domestic cow and we milked her. But no one else in the family got it. The fever and sore joints would last for days, dissipate, then return in undulating waves."


For all that, Stanton believes authorities should keep an open mind about legalising raw milk now that brucellosis and tuberculosis have been eradicated in Australia. Just not yet. "There's not enough evidence that pasteurisation is harmful and not enough evidence that raw milk is beneficial. But we need to keep doing the studies. You can test for all the things that you couldn't test for before, so it's worth looking into."
When Food Standards Australia New Zealand assessed the scientific literature on whether raw milk had any health benefits it acknowledged that vitamins C and B1 were damaged by pasteurisation, but dismissed the importance of this by saying that "milk is not considered to be a major source of [these] nutrients in the Australian ... diet". The report noted that the relevant scientific literature was dated, with scientists losing interest in the subject in the 1940s; little research had been done since then. Raw foodies contend that the enzymes in unpasteurised milk give it its "X factor", although it is disputed whether those enzymes are beneficial to human health.


Kate Netschitowsky, from Adelaide, isn't waiting for any more studies. She grew up drinking raw milk from her aunt and uncle's dairy farm. As an adult suffering digestive problems, a constant blocked nose and earaches, her doctor advised her to steer clear of milk. She did not question the advice, nor wonder why milk never used to be a problem.
Her second child was born with eczema and, at the same time, her cousin gave birth to a son who suffered eczema and asthma so severe he had to be hospitalised. Netschitowsky investigated childhood allergies and came across research showing raw milk had a protective effect. So she fed her daughter raw bath milk and sauerkraut, and in six months the ugly rashes that had covered most of her body had disappeared. Meanwhile, she watched her cousin go through the medical wringer, exhausted by the constant promise that the next drug would work, when it never did, and by the difficulty of avoiding all the usual food suspects - milk, eggs, wheat and nuts.
Netschitowsky prodded her cousin in the direction of traditional nutrition, but the solution seemed too simple to be true, so she was slow to come around. But she did, and five years down the track the boy has also been cured without drugs, says Netschitowsky. You can't even see his eczema scars any more.
Numerous studies have demonstrated the link between raw milk consumption and lower rates of asthma, eczema and various allergies. But when a Food Standards Australia New Zealand committee - consisting of bureaucrats from various government agencies and dairy industry representatives - looked into the matter in a recent review of whether raw milk should remain illegal, they found that while an association between raw milk and fewer allergies and asthma was clearly demonstrated by well-designed studies, it did not prove that raw milk was superior to pasteurised milk. Their reasoning was that raw milk studies were "consistent with a broader prevailing theory that there is a protective effect from a farming lifestyle". This was despite the fact that the studies showed city children who'd never been to a farm got the same benefits from raw milk as farm children.
The latest study of 8300 children, published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology in August this year, showed a 41 per cent reduction in asthma and a 50 per cent reduction in allergies for children who drank raw milk. According to the Weston A. Price Foundation, there are no records of raw milk having ever killed a child. One in 10 Australians has asthma, and 411 died from it in 2009.
Netschitowsky didn't need any more convincing. What she needed was a source closer to her home, and then she heard about Mark Tyler's Moo View dairy.

Mark Tyler took over the family dairy at Willunga Hill, about 50km south of Adelaide, in 1997. Aged 28, he was milking up to 180 cows three times a day as the dairy industry went through the turmoil of deregulation. In 2001, he got a licence to sell unpasteurised milk. So he set up a little farmgate shop and sold about 300 litres a week alongside the 4000 litres a day he supplied to Dairy Farmers. He loved to drink raw milk but he wasn't aware of any health benefits. He just wanted to give people a choice.


But the drought hit. The price of feed went up, the price he got for milk went down, and his farm was suddenly in big trouble. Then, in 2003, the state government banned raw milk. He was surprised at how little resistance the rule-change met with. He would have fought it himself but he was too busy trying to save the farm. In early 2008 he lost the battle and gave dairying away, getting a job off-farm. But then a few cows he hadn't sold started calving and were bursting with more milk than their calves could handle. He didn't have enough to supply the big companies so, at the urging of a few raw-milk aficionados, he divided his cows into 100 lots and started to sell shares in them.




In the three years since, as word spread, he sold 3000 shares in 30 cows. It costs $27.50 a share, and the 400-odd shareholders pay an additional boarding fee of $7.50 a month which entitles them to 1.5 litres of milk a week per share. One family owns 27 shares and so gets about 40 litres. Now, milking just 30 cows twice a day, Tyler is making more money than he did milking 180 three times a day. "There's less stress on cows and less stress on the farm," he says.


When raw milk was legal, Tyler was regularly inspected and had to meet stringent cleanliness guidelines. Now he has fallen outside the system, he wouldn't be tested at all if he didn't do it himself. Not that anyone's ever got sick that he knows of.


"We had the health department tell someone who got sick that it must have been from our milk, but in the same sentence they told the person the bacteria was found in chicken. How can one family get sick where hundreds of other customers don't? If you keep your milking machines clean, if you don't have a high stocking rate, you minimise the risk. If you want to get unpasteurised milk from a 2000-cow dairy, you are asking for trouble."


While plenty of people see the banning of raw milk as being caused by large corporations trying to stamp out small competitors, Tyler thinks it's more innocent than that. "People just follow their line of education, not questioning what they have been told."

[Arrowwind]

But I thought raw milk was legal in California. I use to purchase it all the time.

[RMorgan]

Personally, I don´t recommend anyone to drink milk. It´s not a natural behavior for adults to drink milk, specially milk from another species.

Think about you. I bet you feel disgusted just to think on drinking milk from a woman, on your current age, right? So how you feel ok about drinking milk from a cow? :)

Cow milk is supposed to feed calf, not us.

For those who think milk is a good source of calcium, I must say that the most recent discoveries show that it is just the opposite. Milk has calcium, but it also acidifies the blood, so the body is forced to take calcium out of the bones, to balance the blood´s PH. Milk actually takes more calcium than it provides.

Cheers,

Raf.